this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2025
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Fedimigration Organizing
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This is a place to share resources and coordinate projects to assist in the migration away from legacy social media.
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I agree with those statements if you're just a consumer. However, if you're some sort of content creator, the story is slightly different: your audience might be still solely on the platforms you're trying to avoid.
Example: I'm a hobbyist photographer; I have like maybe 1000 people following me in total across Facebook and Instagram. I signed up for Pixelfed a few days ago; haven't explored much yet, but I'd be surprised if I see even one person I know there. Even if I start posting on Pixelfed exclusively, my photos will probably still end up on Facebook and Instagram, possibly with zero credit. Maybe if I start posting to Pixelfed in parallel and slowly move away from Meta, I don't know...
More problematically, nobody was getting paid to Reddit, But Instagram, YouTube and TikTok are some peoples income, and they really don't have any strong inclination to leave paying platforms. A lot of the truly wild viral content is coming from people trying to make a living out of it.
We are going to have true social interactions on the fediverse. But without algorithmic discovery and paid performers, a lot of people aren't going to come over. And honestly, I'm just fine with that.
I do wish we could get a solid foot in the Facebook door. There's an awful lot of semi-private data there that people aren't getting paid to post that could be free of big media pincers and wallets.
The other side of this is that click through rates on legacy social has cratered. Almost certainly due to bot driven inflated engagement metrics.
Yet the company is still making record profits, well the content creators are starving evermore.
I was talking to a friend who posts on IG, and has gotten a Pixelfed acct in the past week. They were saying, as we hiked in the wilderness under cloudy skies, less than ideal conditions, that I was the only person they knew on Pixelfed. A few hours later they txt’d me the handle of another friend of theirs, who is on Pixelfed. 100% increase in a few hours. Don’t be afraid of Pixelfed. Jump in with both feet! Be afraid of your Meta incarceration. Join us! We’ll have a great time! @[email protected]
For creators, the best choice is probably to post parallel, distributing your content on as many platforms as feasible. That way, you reach even people who only have one of those, and also lower the migration barrier for consumers.
This platforms are really new and it's hard to switch a social media account when you have a following. You have to decide by yourself if this is a fight you are willing to take. I think the best way to do it is to slowly switch and post both places for some time which might be a long time still.
This also happens for the consumers, if there's no content to consume it's hard to switch. That's why we need content creators to also slowly switch. I try to open first the alternatives and if I find there's not much content I check back on reddit but I try to not use it if I don't need to. This takes more effort than just ignoring the whole fediverse thing but I think it's something worth fighting for. With the current situation I think it has become very obvious that social media (or to put it in another way: how humans communicate with one another) shouldn't be controlled by a private company.